nina. kurt and lucy. hot dog and amos. you.
I'm participating in a 31-day blogging challenge called reverb10, responding to writing prompts that are designed to elicit reflections on 2010, and hopes for 2011. You can find out more about it here. I am challenging myself to respond to each prompt in 15 minutes or less.
Today's challenge: Friendship – How has a friend changed you or your perspective on the world this year? Was this change gradual, or a sudden burst?
Nina.
Nina called me the day she was diagnosed with ALS, known as Lou Gehrig's disease. I was driving to Atlanta, so she left a message. I called her back from a rest area. And our friendship became something different and deeper and more intimate in a way she had never intended or wanted or imagined, I fear.
She was always quick to tell people that her name was Nina rhymes with China, lest they irritate the everliving poop out of her by calling her Neena.
She kept Netflix in business by renting weekly installments of The L Word, and told me every week when I needed to return her lesbian porn in my next trip to the post office. This made me laugh every single time.
She chose me as a caregiver, enlisting me in a journey for which I was unprepared.
She was a solitary human, it seemed to me, and yet she invited me in.
She taught me how to sit with the awful. She taught me that sometimes you do things you don't want to and don't think you can, simply because you must. She taught me how to ask for help.
Kurt and Lucy.
I got an email on September 14, 2009, from a man named Kurt who had read Life is a Verb and loved it.
Shortly after that first email, he sent a note about a woman had who called the bookstore where he worked, asking for a specific book about yoga. He looked on the shelf.
"We don't have it in stock, but I can order it for you," he told her. "Would you like to come in and pick it up on Friday?"
"I'm 93 years old," she responded, "and I don't drive any more."
93 years old. Ordering a yoga book because the people in her nursing home weren't teaching it right. A yogi himself, he told her he would bring the book to her when it came in.
I wrote him back and asked him to take this fabulous 93-year-old woman a copy of Life is a Verb, too.
Her name is Lucy.
Kurt met Lucy that Friday when he delivered the book, and began a friendship that spans six decades.
When I posted on Facebook that my book tour would take me to New York, he sent a note asking if I might be able to go with him to visit Lucy at Brightside Manor since she wouldn't be able to come to my reading. "Feel free to say no," he added. "Absolutely yes," I wrote back.
I stood outside my Manhattan hotel, waiting for him to pick me up. How would I know him? I wondered.
"I'll be the one in the gray truck waving wildly," he said. And so he was.
That afternoon with Lucy, a most remarkable woman, and with Kurt, a most remarkable man, was a magical afternoon. We sat outside on the patio, talking for hours. And then Lucy took us on a tour of her home, introducing us to everyone.
That afternoon taught me what connection on a human scale is and can be, what trusting means, how aging can be a powerful thing, what giving and friendship is, and how potent "yes" is.
Hot Dog and Amos.
I don't know how the conversations were first sparked that triangulated this friendship, but three women in three states who met online learned over this past year that the shortest distance between three people is a story, an ongoing, unapologetically honest and hard and beautiful and funny story.
From Hot Dog and Amos, I learned love and truth and transparency and heat and laughter and connection and all the things that ship well.
You.
From all of you who send me letters and emails describing your journeys, all of which I read and to which I am months behind in responding, I learn deep resilience and the capacity of the human heart.
And there are so many more learnings. So very many more.
